The price of the drinks was another matter, though. The Englishmen from Yorkshire and other northern counties gave themselves some horrible shocks by translating cents into pence—like some of them are doing twenty-five years afterwards. But, generally speaking, the quality and quantity of the liquid refreshment induced the most comment, and heartburning.
As Sam and Bert threaded their way through the litter of the camp and its environs, so suggestive of a busy horse-fair, they unconsciously gulped into their lungs large draughts of winy spring air. From a cloudless, turquoise sky, a glittering sun shed waves of summer-like warmth. Cooling breezes flowed gently through the heated camp.
As far as eye could see, small glistening snow-banks, relics of winter's blizzards, flecked the tawny plains in silvery clusters. From beneath snowy mounds, the sudden heat sent tiny streams of water trickling and biting their way over the thawed-out surface of the soil. Following the easiest channels, these transient brooks went gurgling on, joined with others, mixed, laughed, swelled, grew most important as they bubbled along, then all at once—like the colonists themselves did later on—rushed blindly into an ambushed slough.
Before crossing the railway line to enter the village, Sam and Bert lingered a while to hear the Rev. Isaac M. Barr addressing—and being addressed by—a large group of acrid-tempered colonists.
"... Just listen to me, men," he was saying earnestly; "the worst is now almost over. Have faith! Follow your leaders into the land of promise, where independence is waiting for those who will work. My transportation company is not dead, as some mischief-makers would have you believe..."
The reverend gentleman was standing on somebody's big black cabin-trunk. He looked worried. His clerical spruceness was fraying at the edges a bit. Pausing nervously to open a folded sheet of paper—a telegram from St. John appertaining to the trifling matter of five hundred tons of missing luggage—he took advantage of the break in his speech to moisten his lips with his tongue. They were dry, like ashes.
Beating up against the pleasant breeze, fragments of a song being sung uproariously, struck his tired ears in variable gusts of sound, now faint, now loud. With perfectly diabolical clearness, the ribald voices wafted verse after verse across to the crowd.
"Barr, Barr, wily old Barr,
He'll do you as much as he can;"
"Men!" shouted the dispirited leader in a desperate attempt to smother the song's ugly significance. "Be British——"
With a crowd's usual cruelty, a few of the bravest cowards jeered and mocked. Meanwhile, relentlessly, like the toppling crest of a wave breaking on the beach, the verse went on—